Utopia
The Sweet East
The Sweet East is a coming-of-age tale told by unreliable narrators (screenwriter Nick Pinkerton and director Sean Price Williams, making audacious feature debuts), and centred around a conceited anti-hero with a personality disorder. Your feelings towards that concept alone will reflect how you will react to the film itself. You can try giving it the benefit of the doubt if you’re already feeling irritated, but I’m afraid your efforts will all be for naught.
Sharp Stick
I can’t remember that last time I wanted to grab the reigns of a movie as badly as I did while watching Sharp Stick, Lena Dunham’s return to directing self-written material since her acclaimed HBO series Girls. With this latest endeavour, Dunham is heading in a good direction with interesting and peculiar characters and then, two-thirds through the movie, Sharp Stick takes a hard turn into another character arc that seems like an unfair trade-off…
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair
There’s a lot of ambiguity at foot in Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and, for some, the film will offer too many “inconclusive” story threads. However, that ambiguity is what makes Schoenbrun’s movie creepy and disturbing, and opens the film up to various discussions about selling your life to the Internet.
The Scary of Sixty-First
Until recently, when she was cast in the third season of HBO’s hit series Succession, Dasha Nekrasova was one of those niche internet celebrities that enjoys considerable notoriety in select circles while remaining virtually unknown in the larger public consciousness. She is perhaps best known as the co-host of the popular left-leaning podcast, Red Scare. Much like her podcast, Nekrasova’s debut directorial feature is calculated to invite controversy. Brash and antagonistic, The Scary of Sixty-First…
